Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Olympic Athletes Get Their Own Stamps

Reuters is reporting athletes at this year’s Olympics are being offered the ultimate souvenir — personalised Beijing 2008 postage stamps with their own faces on them.

Reporter Catherine Bremer writes, "The stamps are guaranteed to bring a smile to relatives’ faces back home, although you’ll need six of them for a foreign-bound postcard. Post office employees in the athletes’ village say coaches and officials are snapping them up as fast as a 100m sprinter."

Post office worker Li Qiang is quoted in the piece as saying, “They are very popular. Some are buying 10 or 11 sheets." For 45 yuan ($6.6) for a sheet of 12 you can have your photo taken and superimposed stamps samples of which are on the wall.

Li says well over a hundred sets of stamps have been printed so far, featuring Germans, Czech athletes and half the Chinese baseball team for a start.